> NOTE: Moore's law is concerned with number of transistors on a chip. That number has climbed, it's just split into several cores.
Exactly, so now Moore's law is working against JavaScript, since JS doesn't do threading. So let's assume JS somehow magically gets to be ~2x slower than native instead of ~4x slower. With the standard being quad cores now, that makes JS ~8x slower than native doing image processing - you know, that whole "instagram" thing that's insanely popular on smartphones. And during that ~8x longer it's spending processing that image, your UI is completely frozen and unresponsive.
Yes I know about WebWorkers, but WebWorkers are hideously inefficient & slow by design. The limitations with them are also absurd, it is not a substitute for threading. The world is better off forgetting that they exist - which it basically has.
Exactly, so now Moore's law is working against JavaScript, since JS doesn't do threading. So let's assume JS somehow magically gets to be ~2x slower than native instead of ~4x slower. With the standard being quad cores now, that makes JS ~8x slower than native doing image processing - you know, that whole "instagram" thing that's insanely popular on smartphones. And during that ~8x longer it's spending processing that image, your UI is completely frozen and unresponsive.
Yes I know about WebWorkers, but WebWorkers are hideously inefficient & slow by design. The limitations with them are also absurd, it is not a substitute for threading. The world is better off forgetting that they exist - which it basically has.